Contributing to that fact may also be that parts of the market (and thus the industry) seem to be moving to the more expensive SSD and even PCM (phase-change memory) technology (away from classic hard-disk drives).Mostly for performance reasons and forced by the need for real-time data analytics - Big Data is the buzzword of the moment here!

So an exciting new industry is being established with lots of startups (like Violin) and venture-capital involved. Watch this space!

And if you felt like there was too much "cloud" in our industry recently, here's someone who certainly agrees: Tom Trainer describes why "monolithic scale-out-NAS" is not what a real storage cloud should be: "True cloud storage is a disruptive paradigm shift" as he states!